Paul and Karen Brower adore everything about their new house in The Oaks Farm development, even though people still knock on the front door, thinking it is still the development’s model home.

The kitchen in the Browers’ new home dwarfs the one in their longtime Laguna Beach house.

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The great room of the Browers’ showcase home in The Oaks Farm community shows the personalized touches added by interior designer Gary Finley, including custom built-in shelving, bespoke upholstery materials and a large rug that ties the room’s color palette together.

Having a completely private outdoor bathing area is a design element that the Browers never imagined having in their Laguna Beach house, one of the many reasons they love this brand-new home.

It all happened on a whim (and it made one of their daughters sob), but Paul and Karen Brower are just thrilled with their new home in The Oaks Farms development in San Juan Capistrano, where they have happily retired after living in the same house in upper Three Arch Bay in Laguna Beach for much of their lives.

“We spent 39 years in the same house,” Karen Brower says, ensconced on the massive custom-made sectional sofa in her new home, without a hint of nostalgia.

“I thought they’d put me in a hole in the backyard there when I was done,” agrees her husband, Paul, with a chuckle.

Then one fateful Sunday, Karen suggested they trot on down to the horsey community in SJC, to take a look at the new development of 32 homes being built on land previously owned by Joan Irvine Smith, many of which (including theirs) overlook the active equestrian center nearby.

“Karen got a flyer, an advertisement, on a weekend and said, ‘Oh, let’s go look at this.’ I didn’t have an excuse to not go, so we did.” Paul remembers. “This was one of the three model homes. We went through this model and we both were sort of awestruck and said, ‘Wow, this is really a cool place.’”

It didn’t take long for the Browers to decide that this was the place where they wanted to be; in fact, as Paul says, “So long story short, we bought the house in a week!” But it took them quite a while to actually make the move into the fully furnished, 3,520 square-foot home that sits on a 10,184 square-foot lot, for the developer was still using it as a show model when they made the purchase. And the Browers had to figure out what to do with their Laguna home as well, much to the chagrin of their two grown daughters.

“The girls were not happy with us leaving their home that they were born in, grew up in, or with us leaving Laguna. There was a lot of stress initially,” Paul recalls. “So we decided to rent out that house. Some day it will be theirs, of course.”

The couple – he a semi-retired physician, she a retired insurance broker – were determined to give The Oaks Farms home a try, for a variety of reasons. “We had no intention of ever moving from Laguna, but we came here and fell in love with this house, and what we liked about it best was that it was one story. As you get older, that just makes sense. It’s one story and wide open, full of space. Our Laguna house was 60 years old and remodeled many times, two stories with both the living area and the master upstairs,” Karen explains. “And a very small, enclosed kitchen.”

Their new home features high, massively beamed ceilings, a great room that includes living room, dining room and a huge kitchen, all with an outside wall that opens up into the lushly landscaped backyard, creating a welcoming indoor-outdoor entertaining space. And the Browers’ dog Millie has gotten used to the horses that meander by, too, although her owners are not part of the horsey set that have populated this area for decades.

Their four grandchildren love the new house as well, especially since the couple enlisted Laguna Beach-based interior designer Gary Finley to transform the model house into a real home for them. “Gary gets full credit,” Paul says. “Gary really turned it from a house into a home and it’s just like an old shoe, so comfortable. The requirement was it had to be dog proof and baby proof – Karen said, ‘Listen. This is not a museum.’”

But it certainly is beautiful. “The show house was a little generic, all in whites and off whites. I brought some color into it. The large blue-toned carpet was the starting point basically, and the fabric we used for the dining chairs and sofa pillows. All the furniture was custom designed and made for them,” Finley explains.

He also added built-in cabinets in a number of rooms, transformed the sales office into a “bedroom, bathroom and closet” for the grandkids and overall improved the flow of the whole house. One thing that stayed put, however, was the pretty outdoor zinc bathtub, located in a private garden nook off the master bath.

Allowing a year from when they purchased the house to when they actually moved in gave them a unique opportunity to plan out just what they wanted to keep and reject, too. “The time we had before they moved in last fall, that gave us the luxury of actually experiencing the space not as a living dwelling, but just as a finished product,” Finley continues, “with the floors and the wall color and the beams and the cabinetry in place, our furnishing package could marry to those elements. And I had the luxury of shopping in the existing model for furniture and elements that we wanted to keep, like the piece of art in the entry.”

But there were very few items from that made the move from the Laguna Beach house they occupied for so long. “We got rid of everything. We brought our bed and one piece of furniture from our old house,” Karen says gleefully.

And that old home? For at least two members of the family, this lovely new house will never quite replace it. “Our daughters still call it home and they call this one ‘your house.’ One of them went and sat outside the old house in her car and she just sat there and the new tenants came out and said, ‘Can I help you?’ and I think she started to cry.”

But her mother and father are never going back to there, for after six months of living in The Oaks Farm, their “experiment” is now solid reality. “We haven’t looked back. We’re here. We’re staying,” Paul Brower vows. ■

As a longtime freelance journalist, Jenny Peters covers beats that range from entertainment to lifestyle topics. She writes on film, travel, restaurants, wine, design, architecture, beauty, spas, cars, fashion and celebrity events for USA Today, AARP, New York Magazine and many other domestic and international media outlets. Find her online at: www.JetSetJen.com